To:HIS SISTER MARIA

Written:Written December 3 or 4, 1909Published:First published in 1929 in the journalProletarskaya RevolyutsiyaNo. 11.

      Sent from Paris.

      Printed from 
 the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 37,

      pages440-441.Translated:The Late George H. HannaTranscription\Markup:D. MorosPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

MariaIlyinichna Ulyanova,

Davydov’s House, Apt. 4,

Bozheninsky Street,

Devichye Polye,

Moscow,

Russia

DearManyasha,

TodayI received an issue ofUtro Rossiiwith the vulgar
nonsense about
Gorky.[1]For some days now a number
of newspapers in Paris (L’e;clair) and in Berlin
(Berliner
Tageblatt)[2]have been engaged in similar lies. Some days
ago there was a good refutation of this mass of lies inVorwärts, where it was very correctly demonstrated and very
wittily explained that this is all one big nonsensical
invention. Some fool heard rumours he did not understand and
got everything wrong—scraps he had picked up about
otzovism, the school, philosophy and so on.Utro Rossiimust
be a shady little rag to have cooked up an “interview”
just for the sake of sensation. TodayRechis also engaged
in the fabrication of similar scandal. The Cadets are happy
to have something to lie and talk scandal about.

Howare you? How is Mother? I have had no news from
you for quite a while. Write and let me know how you
are getting on, what you are doing, and how Mitya is. There
have been no changes here. Winter is beginning—! go tothe library. The apartment is warm. Y.V. is feeling rather
poorly. Nadya is zealously studying French.

Allthe best, kiss Mother many, many times.

Yours,V. U.

P.S.Did you get the reply to the historian? With regard
to my books at
Sablino[3]—if the opportunity occurs, it
would be fine to ask one of our St. Petersburg friends to
send them to me here, if not all of them, then at least what
there is of Marx and Engels and the best of the classics.

[1]OnNovember 15, 1909, the newspaperUtro Rossii(Morning of
Russia), organ of the Moscow industrialists published by P. P.
Ryabushinsky, printed a libellous story about “M. Gorky’s
Expulsion from the S. D. Party”. The “interview” of which Lenin
writes was published on November 17 under the heading “The
Excommunication of Maxim Gorky”. This libellous account was
taken up byRechand other bourgeois papers, Russian and foreign.
In reply to the inventions about Gorky’s expulsion that were
being spread by bourgeois newspapers Lenin wrote his article
“The Bourgeois Press Fable About the Expulsion of Gorky” (seeCollected Works, Vol. 16, p. 106).

[2]L’Eclair(Lightning)–a Paris newspaper published from 1888
to 1939.

BerlinerTageblatt (Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung—
Berlin Daily and Commercial Gazette)—published from 1871 to
1939.

[3]Lenin’ssister Anna, her husband Mark Yelizarov, and Lenin’s
mother were living at the village of Sablino near a railway station
of the same name, not far from St. Petersburg. Lenin visited
his relatives there in 1905 and 1906. A room was allotted to him
in the cottage and he was able to work and rest there.